TOP FIVE ARTIST TRAJECTORY COMPARISONS
On this Top Five, I thought it would be an interesting and fun exercise to investigate five artist comparisons where I was able to see a lot of parallels through the reasons I will explicate below in their career trajectories. Some are a little more unusual and slightly tongue-in-cheek, some more obvious and serious, but in observing the trajectory of these artists’ careers, the comparisons immediately suggested themselves to me. Without further ado, let’s get into them:
1. Thrown and Ice Spice
Thrown are the Ice Spice of the heavy music scene: a meteoric rise with a relative paucity of material. Insane levels of hype. A highly-anticipated full-length barely cracking twenty minutes. People divided on if they’re overrated or the real deal. While sonically nothing alike, to date the trajectories of each in their respective spheres are actually stunningly similar.
2. Bring Me the Horizon and The Clash
Genre-bending titans always one step ahead of the curve, rising to levels of popularity their beginnings in the genres of deathcore and punk, respectively, would’ve seemed to preclude, I can’t help but map much of the career of Bring Me the Horizon onto that of "the only band that matters." As ultimate gateway bands and legends in their respective spheres with an ear for radio-friendly hooks who perhaps paradoxically are/were unafraid to experiment and even alienate inflexible fans, the comparison seems more than apt from my vantage point.
3. Malevolence and Hatebreed
I’ve test-driven this comparison a few times and the reception has seemed a bit tepid, but I’m going to give it one final go and try to better articulate it: it’s not just the bands’ sonic similarities in their ability to combine both groove and metallic precision with the aggression of hardcore, S-tier mosh parts, and ever-so-slight flirtations with more mainstream rock. Each have proven massively influential in their own right, and are actively hand-picking bands for Jamey Jasta’s Perseverance Media Group and Malevolence’s MLVLTD Music, respectively. Obviously Hatebreed has been around for far longer and have cast perhaps the largest shadow of any hardcore band of the last thirty years, so the comparison might be unfair, but it’s less about the measuring stick of what Hatebreed has meant to hardcore and more about Malevolence’s similarities so far in their career as a band with similar crossover potential and as modern heirs to the style of Hatebreed carving out their own legacy.
4. Slaughter to Prevail and Megadeth
I feel like this one is pretty obvious beyond both bands being in a respective "Big Four"—modern deathcore in the former case, thrash metal in the latter—with each’s polarizing, "anti-woke" frontman in this Tom MacDonald/Ronnie Radke space of readily leaning into and seemingly actively courting controversy to the delight of a certain number of their core followers and to the disgust of their critics. At least neither has featured Ben Shapiro (…yet?), and hopefully it stays that way. One Shapiro feature is one too many.
5. Knocked Loose and Trash Talk
I almost went with Sleep Token and Genesis: proggy and weird with a keen pop sensibility and significant mainstream potential, but I had to go with Knocked Loose and Trash Talk as Knocked Loose’s career trajectory has remarkably-similar parallels to that of Trash Talk: not only have both bands gotten significantly more attention outside of the hardcore world by Pitchfork types who usually doesn’t come anywhere near this stuff, but even their crossover into the world of rap has been oddly synchronous. It’s not even that both bands have performed extensively with rappers (and in Trash Talk’s case had Suge Knight and Katt Williams show up at a show on top of being signed to Odd Future Records), it’s down to the specific rappers: both bands have opened for $uicideboy$ and have shared or will share the stage with Danny Brown!